


To Perish Twice

by violet_storms



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Coping, Established Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter, Everyone Has Issues, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Multi, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Post-Fall (Hannibal), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, can you blame them, everyone dealing with the post-fall, everyone is mad at will and hannibal, not graphic but it's hannibal so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:00:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25866328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violet_storms/pseuds/violet_storms
Summary: Five times Will Graham was fire, and one time he was actually ice all along.
Relationships: Abigail Hobbs & Freddie Lounds, Alana Bloom/Margot Verger, Bella Crawford/Jack Crawford, Beverly Katz & Jimmy Price & Brian Zeller, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 7
Kudos: 95





	To Perish Twice

**Author's Note:**

> Ten thousand thanks to [@alexanderavery998](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexanderavery998) for beta reading this! Title is from [Fire and Ice](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44263/fire-and-ice) by Robert Frost.

_i. day of_

It used to be a game between them, watching Will and Dr. Lecter. Peering around corners, glancing through windows, hovering in doorways—the three of them, co-conspirators. _“Look, their shoulders are touching.” “Ooh, I think Will is blushing.” “I thought he said he hated eye contact?”_ It’s Beverly, always Beverly, who turns it into something more. “Five dollars,” she says casually one day, “That Will mentions Dr. Lecter twice in our next case.”

“Oh, you’re on,” says Brian, because of course he does.

Their next case turns out to be a string of people pushed from balconies. “Does the killer have some kind of vendetta against them?” Jimmy wonders aloud as they stand over the latest body.

“The victims?”

“No, balconies.”

“Not a vendetta,” Will says unexpectedly, because even after all these months they still aren’t expecting him. “It’s a fixture. And it’s not about balconies, it’s about heights. He’s afraid of them.”

“He’s scared of heights,” repeats Jack, eyebrows raised.

“Acrophobia, as I suppose Dr. Lecter would say,” says Will, and Beverly’s mouth quirks up. _One,_ she mouths. Will goes on. “He resents it, that fear, that _weakness._ This is his way of conquering it. He’s...working his way up.”

“So what, he’s going to throw people off cliffs next?” Brian asks, skeptical.

“No, probably buildings,” says Will. “The cliff would be the climax of it all, like the final boss in a video game.” He shakes his head, just slightly, and turns to Jack. “I have to go. Dr. Lecter had to change the time of my appointment.”

“That’s two,” says Beverly, after he’s gone. “Cough up.”

“It doesn’t count—he wasn’t mentioning him in conversation, he was telling Jack something important.”

“You can’t make up rules like that. A bet’s a bet.”

“All right, here. I bet you five dollars that by the end of the week, Dr. Lecter will show up here with a lunch for Will. Something homemade and pretentious, obviously.”

“I’ll take that,” Jimmy chimes in. “I don’t think they’ll be at lunch level until the end of the month.”

Beverly smiles her wicked smile. “Okay then,” she says. “Let’s do this.”

And so begins the betting pool. Over time, the amount goes up and down. “I’m going up to twenty dollars,” Jimmy will say. “I’ve just seen them in the parking lot and they were talking way too close.”

“I’m moving back down to ten,” Brian will respond. “I realized the other day we forgot to consider Dr. Bloom.”

“Well, I’m going up to thirty,” says Beverly. “I think Dr. Bloom is either going to bring ‘em much closer or much further apart. Rooting for the former.”

“Risky move,” Jimmy comments.

“I’m not into playing it safe.”

They never actually end up paying each other any money, because the stakes keep changing, and then—suddenly—Will is in a mental hospital. “Ten dollars the doctor testifies against him,” Brian says, because of course he does. But the betting pool isn’t funny anymore.

And then nothing is, not without Beverly. Always Beverly.

It isn’t until the cliff that either of them remembers. They stand looking at the waves and Jimmy says quietly, “What do you want to bet they survived that fall?” and it all comes rushing back. Every prediction. Every observation. Every warning sign.

“We should have known,” says Brian. “Should have guessed. What they had was never normal.”

“I didn’t think…” Jimmy looks down at the waves again. It’s the middle of the day, but the waters still seem black. “Even after everything, I didn’t think he was capable of this.”

Capable. In a way, Brian thinks, they were the ones who should have known best what Will was capable of. He was their colleague. He was almost their friend. They’d looked into his eyes every day, eaten lunch with him, laughed and joked with him, shaken hands with him. But in the end, he had not spared a thought for them, and now they couldn’t spare enough for him.

Brian turns away, but there is nowhere to look where Will is not present. Blood fans out from where the body of Francis Dolarhyde had lain. Bright yellow flags litter the terrace. Shadows wearing lab coats move behind the windows of the house. The scene is so familiar, yet so terribly foreign, Brian has to close his eyes for a moment.

“He was always capable of this,” says Brian. “He killed Hobbs. He killed Tier. He as good as killed Chilton. And Beverly.” The name scrapes at his throat. “It’s his fault she’s dead. His fault about Jack. His fault about all of it, about everyone.”

“Not us,” Jimmy says. “We’re still standing.”

“That’s the worst part,” says Brian. “He burned everything down. It’s never going to be the same. We’re still standing, but we’re standing in a pile of ashes.”

“We can rebuild,” says Jimmy gently, but Brian turns away.

“We should have known,” he repeats. “All those hints. All that time. All those bets. We should have known.”

(Yes, they should have.)

  


_ii. one day after_

“ _‘Deranged criminals Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham rumored to have survived plunge from cliff and now on the run.’_ Hmm...doesn’t really work. Needs more spice, don’t you think?”

“If you say so.”

“How about, _‘Highly deranged crime duo Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham survive death-defying cliff plunge and are now set to continue their vicious murder spree’?”_ Freddie Lounds leans back and smiles at her dim computer screen. “Yes, that’s much better. You like it?”

“Not really,” says Abigail. She’s leaning against the wall, looking as casual as Freddie’s ever seen her. She crosses her arms, watching the journalist as she types out the edits. “Is it weird, writing about Will again?” she asks.

“No,” says Freddie. “It’s almost second nature at this point. I mean, even when he tried to drop off the grid, his name’s been in my headlines for the past...what, five years now?” Abigail shrugs. Freddie raises her eyebrows at her. “Aren’t dead people supposed to be all-knowing?”

“I’m only in your head, remember?”

“Oh, right.” Freddie watches Abigail but doesn’t get up from her chair, doesn’t reach out to touch her even though she’s close enough to do so. “I suppose this means I’m going insane.”

“Guilt hallucinations are more common than you’d think.”

“Sure, but they don’t normally talk, do they?” Abigail shrugs again. “Well, I may be losing it, but at least I’m not a psychopath,” Freddie says bracingly.

“I’m not sure Will would agree. He _hated_ you, you know.”

Freddie gives Abigail a malicious smile. “I’m used to it.”

She is. Freddie Lounds is _very_ used to being hated. Really, Will Graham’s childish rage toward her was on the small scale of things when she thinks of the six people (and counting) who’ve sued her for libel over the course of her career. Or all the people she’s used to get information in the past. And who can forget the other reporters who slide those snide comments into their less popular tabloids? Freddie’s been called every name under the sun, in print and in person, more times than she cares to count. She’s used to it.

“You didn’t make yourself popular at the BAU, did you?” Abigail comments. “Will wasn’t the only one who hated you there, now that I think about it.”

“No, he wasn’t, but I used to prefer his particular brand of hatred. The obvious kind. Better than Alana Bloom’s patronizing, or Jack’s badly disguised disgust. At least Will was honest. At least he didn’t pretend to be polite.”

“You _used to,”_ Abigail notes.

“Well, yes. Then I died.” Freddie smiles bitterly. “It’s funny how quickly your opinions change about someone when they drag you screaming out of a car window. I bought a gun after Gideon, you know. I made sure I could protect myself. I thought I was capable enough, but I wasn’t. If it wasn’t for Jack, I’d be dead.”

Freddie is never going to forget how it felt for those five minutes when she thought she was going to die. She played it off okay at the time, she hopes, once Will got through to her and Jack arrived. She remembers forcing a smile and saying something about them paying for the funeral, and they looked relieved that she was handling it so well.

She didn’t handle it well. Freddie can’t count the number of times since it happened that she’s woken up in a cold sweat, Will’s face swimming before her eyes, only knows it’s enough that her hands shake whenever she hears the sound of breaking glass.

“Dying wasn’t good for you,” Abigail says. “I understand. It wasn’t good for me, either.”

“At least people mourned you,” Freddie says sourly. “It’s one thing to know that a lot of people hate you, and another to realize that no one would be sad if you died. Alana Bloom was the only person who cared, and Alana Bloom doesn’t even _like_ me.” Freddie recalls how tightly the psychiatrist had hugged her after learning she was alive. The first hug she had gotten in a long time, and it was because she’d faked her own death. Typical.

“Don’t act like I was more missed than you were,” says Abigail. “You and Alana were the only people who were actually upset about _Abigail.”_

“I cared about you more than Alana did,” says Freddie childishly, and Abigail rolls her eyes. “Well, it’s true. You were a victim to her, someone to save. You were a person to me.”

“A person you used.”

“I never said otherwise.” Freddie closes her laptop, and the loss of its faint light submerges the room in darkness. She goes over to the window and pushes the curtains aside. The street lights against the black remind her of the white caps on the waves from yesterday on the cliff, but it’s not the cliff Freddie wants to think about now, it’s a balcony, the balcony she was standing on the last time she spoke to Will.

She remembers it so clearly. It was right after they finished the interview with Chilton and she was outside on the terrace, leaning against the railing, and he said, “You know, we had a case years ago where someone was pushing people off these things.”

“You going to push me off this one?”

“Not today,” he said. “We need that article first.”

Freddie looked at him. “Why do you want to get hold of the Dragon so badly?”

“To save lives.” He offered her the ghost of a smile.

“No, Jack wants to save lives. That’s why he does what he does. Why are _you_ here? Why do you do this, Will?”

Will leaned out over the railing, and Freddie could see the outline of the skyscrapers reflected in his eyes. “I do this, because if I didn’t, I’m afraid of what I might do instead.”

“You act like you haven’t already done it.”

“How many times are you going to accuse me of being a serial killer?”

“As many times as it takes for it to stick. You almost killed me once.”

“You tried to shoot me.”

“I won’t miss next time,” she told him, and she meant it.

“Is there going to be a next time?”

“Depends on you, doesn’t it?”

“That it does,” said Will. He looked at her. “I haven’t forgotten what you tried to do to Abigail.”

“I haven’t forgotten what you actually did to her,” Freddie responded. “I never will.”

“Well, Freddie,” he had said. “I’m glad we understand each other.”

“You did understand him,” Abigail says, from across the room. Freddie turns to face her in the darkness.

“Not enough to keep you alive.”

Abigail shakes her head.

Freddie steps away from the window and picks up her camera from where it’s balanced on a pile of equipment in the corner. She runs her hands over the familiar surface, the cold metal chilling her skin.

“So are they alive?” Abigail asks her.

“They will be. I know them,” says Freddie. “I know them better than any other reporter out there. And you know what? I’m done with caring about whether or not people hate me, because now they’re going to find out why they should have listened to me. I’m going to write it. I’m going to prove it.” She looks up at Abigail, who isn’t Abigail, who can never be Abigail. “I’m not going to fail you again,” she says. “I’m going to make them hear me this time.”

Abigail smiles at her sadly.

Abigail will never smile again.

“They should have listened to me,” says Freddie. “They all should have listened to me.”

(Yes, they should have.)

  


_iii. one week after_

The day he gets the news that Hannibal and Will are alive, Jack goes to visit Bella’s grave.

Her memorial is isolated away from the other tombstones, near a small copse of trees at the edge of the cemetery. The flowers he left for her last week are only slightly wilted, benefiting from the shade. There’s a picture of her taped to the gravestone, and it is to this he speaks, voice low but still carrying.

“It’s my fault, you know, Bella.”

He pauses to let the words sink in. He can picture her response, eyebrows lifted: “Your fault about what, exactly?”

 _About Will,_ he thinks. _About every version of him._

Often, it seems to Jack that he has known three Will Grahams. There was the first Will, the Will who hid behind glasses he didn’t need and tics he exaggerated so people wouldn’t want to look at him. The Will who never laughed unless it was at his own expense, the Will who wouldn’t meet your eyes unless you forced him. The Will who had warned Jack, more than once, that things would go wrong.

“And I listened,” he informs the gravestone. “That’s the worst part. I listened, but I did nothing.”

Then there was the second Will, the Will whose hands and voice shook more often than not, whose laugh went on for too long and wavered on a vicious edge. The Will who didn’t only look you in the eyes, but _stared_ as though trying to make sure you were really human. The Will who wasn’t sure if he was really human.

That Will hovers on the edges of Jack’s mind, his gaze accusing. Once, Jack tried to reach for him, when he was still a solid person and not a wisp of smoke in Jack’s head. He remembers watching Will standing at the edge of the balcony, looking down at the street below. The air is bitterly chill and everyone is wrapped up in coats except for Will, who acts like he doesn’t even feel the cold. Jack walks up behind him and Will says, without looking away from the ground, “I’m not going to jump.”

“I never said you were.”

“No, but you were thinking about it.”

Yes, he was. “What do you make of it?” Jack asks, and Will waves his hand, impatient with the question, still not facing him.

“Same killer, new balcony. He’s getting bolder. He’s going to make a mistake soon, I think, but we should keep an eye on cliffs in the area. He’s almost to the final level.”

“You aren’t cold?” Jack says, not listening, and now Will turns, eyes piercing him.

“How could I be?” he says. “Feels like there’s a fire trapped inside me. I’m burning from the inside out. I’m never _cold_ anymore.”

“Will,” says Jack, and he’s got nothing to follow that up with, but he doesn’t have to because Will looks away.

“Don’t push it,” he says. “Just don’t.”

So Jack doesn’t.

“Why not?” he can imagine Bella asking.

_Because I was afraid. Afraid, always, of what I might find if I looked too far, afraid of what would happen if I pushed._

“We both knew he was my fault,” says Jack. “The second version—he would never have existed if Will hadn’t killed Hobbs, and Will wouldn’t have killed Hobbs if I hadn’t put the gun in his hand. But for a little while, I thought he could heal. Become whole again. The mental hospital was enough to split him again, but he didn’t split. I convinced myself he didn’t. The Will who emerged from behind those bars was the same Will Graham who shot Hobbs, yes, but the same Will Graham who smiled for Georgia Madchen, the same Will Graham who cried for Beverly Katz. He was still the same Will, and he was on my side.”

Bella’s flat eyes stare out at him from the photograph and Jack remembers how, even as the fire trapped inside his friend raged on and on, he looked into Will’s eyes and told himself that there would only ever be two versions of Will Graham, the first and the second.

It took almost dying for him to realize the truth. When Will woke up after they sewed him back together, Jack went to see him. It took one look. One look for Jack to know his _friend_ fell from the balcony a long, long time ago, and he was staring at a version of Will that he had never seen before.

The last Will Graham was a different kind of broken. Instead of a shattered teacup, he was one someone had put back together all wrong. He didn’t smile, didn’t laugh, his face barely showed expression unless you mentioned the word, the name, the person who started all of it. He lit up for that. Not a bright, shining sort of light. More like an inferno.

“You know all about a different present, Bella,” Jack says. “We both do. Where we would be if you hadn’t gotten cancer. Where we would be if you hadn’t died. Will knew about them too. Whenever he looked at me some part of him wondered if he should have killed me, if he would have been happier if he had.”

They had both felt it. Neither of them had ever said it. Neither of them ever will, because this time, Will did jump. Or he fell. What was the difference, anyway? Once you’ve gone over, there’s no going back. Jack of all people should have known that.

The wind whistles in the trees, and Bella’s grave sits cold and silent. Not for the first time, Jack thinks of how it’s half-empty, how one day, inevitably, the ground will be torn up again and they will lower his coffin into the ground next to hers. _Jack Crawford, faithful husband, utter fool._

“It’s my fault,” he says again, and thinks of Will Graham, the broken, burned man who went over a cliff rather than be separated from Hannibal again. The ruined, shattered teacup of a person. He thinks of the cliff’s edge, blood turned brown spattered across the terrace behind him, rolling waves below him. He thinks about inevitability.

He pushes that thought away.

They had warned him. Will had warned him. He had warned himself. He had known what sort of creature hid behind Will’s eyes, what sort of fire burned inside him. All along, he had known.

“I should have pushed,” he whispers to the grave. “I should have stopped this.”

(Yes, he should have.)

  


_iv. one month after_

The news is saying Hannibal and Will are alive, and it’s so impossible Alana would laugh about it if she weren’t so certain it was true.

She gets the confirmation from Freddie Lounds, which in itself is an amusing thing—calling Freddie Lounds to get the truth about something. But the moment she saw the broadcast, Alana knew she didn’t have a choice. It’s more than the threat to their safety, Morgan’s safety. It’s that she can’t stand _not_ knowing, can’t stop the question from echoing around in her mind.

“Freddie Lounds speaking.”

“Freddie, it’s Alana Bloom.”

“Hello, Dr. Bloom,” says Freddie. If she’s surprised, her voice doesn’t show it. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Is it true, Freddie?” Alana asks, and holds her breath. Then she exhales, because she’ll be damned if she lets the thought of Hannibal take control of her again.

“Why me?” says Freddie. Alana is confused.

“Why you, what?”

“Why call me? Why not Jack or Zeller?”

“Because,” says Alana, “You’re not gonna soften the blow for me. You don’t care about sparing my feelings. You don’t like me and I don’t like you. So tell me.”

There’s a pause, and then—“Yes, it’s true. At first it was all rumors, but then there was a confirmed sighting near an airport. They’re alive.”

“Oh my god,” says Alana quietly, but no shock registers in her chest. _Of course they’re alive. Of course they are. They have to be._ She can’t imagine, still, a world without them in it. And she hates that she can’t.

Silence on the other end of the line. Alana can’t seem to take the phone away from her ear. An odd choking sound comes out of her mouth and she realizes she’s crying, and suddenly she is _so angry_ that Hannibal can still do this to her from the other side of the world, rob her of her composure when she can’t even see him, but the tears keep coming anyway.

“So you’re gonna let him win, huh?” says Freddie, and it’s so unexpected that Alana gets her breath back.

“W-What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

Alana blinks, and if it had been any other day she would have had a retort, but the words freeze on her tongue.

“Well, I’m going to go now,” says Freddie, when she doesn’t respond. “Bye.” _Click._

Alana’s arm finally relaxes and she looks down at her phone screen without seeing it. Freddie’s words dance around her head, accompanied by a different voice, a colder voice.

_So you’re gonna let him win, huh?_

_You died in my kitchen when you chose to be brave._

_So you’re gonna let him win?_

“Alana?”

Margot is hovering in the doorway. Alana looks up at her. “They’re alive,” she says tonelessly, and Margot crosses the room and sits next to her on the bed, reaching out to wipe the tears from her face.

“We’re going to be okay,” her wife says quietly, but Alana shakes her head.

“I’m not crying because they’re alive,” she says. “I’m crying because—because they’re dead. Will is dead. The Will I knew, he’s gone.”

“The Will you knew has been gone for a long, long time,” Margot tells her. Her voice is not unkind, but the words hurt all the same, because Alana knows they’re true.

“Even when I thought the worst of him, I always hoped he’d prove me wrong,” she says. “Until the very end.”

Images flash before her eyes. Will’s house. Running with his dogs in the field. The broken chimney. Hannibal at the witness stand. Will handing her a gun. _Be blind, don’t be brave._ But she was blind anyway.

“I thought he could save himself,” she says. “I thought he could let go of Hannibal. For a while, I was sure he had.”

“You see the best in people,” Margot says. “That doesn’t make you weak.”

“I didn’t use to think so,” Alana whispers. “Now, I’m not so sure.”

“Mama?”

Alana and Margot turn to see Morgan standing in the doorway, trailing blankets on the ground. Margot hurries over, lifting the toddler in her arms. “Baby, you should be in bed.”

“Had a nightmare,” Morgan mumbles. Margot glances back at Alana, then smooths the hair off their son’s face and steps into the hallway, closing the door behind her.

Alone, Alana stands and paces the room. That isn’t right, so she sits back down on the bed, then immediately springs to her feet again. She feels like tearing her hair out, like screaming until her throat gives up, but she doesn’t do either of those things. Instead, she enters the tiny bathroom and turns on the sink.

Watching the water spiral down the drain, Alana plucks the threads of Will Graham from her memories. There goes his smile. There, his laugh. The look on his face the day he kissed her. The feel of his hand in hers across a metal table. There go the bars on his cell and the pain in his eyes. Alana watches the whirlpool suck them away.

Once, in a dark room in a bloody house, Alana made a bargain for Will’s life and a monster spun her gold. But the Will she bargained for is gone, and he’s never coming back. So, between stark-white bathroom walls, Alana mourns for a dead man. A burned man. A lost man. She mourns for a blue-eyed girl and a black-haired woman, and she mourns for the people who loved them.

Most of all, she mourns for the person whose trust in the world was repaid in broken glass and shattered bones.

When Margot finds her, the water from the sink is overflowing in the basin and Alana’s tears are gone. “So Will is dead,” Margot whispers. “We’re not. You and me and Morgan. We’re going to survive this, Alana.”

And they are, thinks Alana. They have to, because Hannibal was right: she did die in his kitchen. Alana knows what it is to have darkness creep through your vision, feel your own heart falter, fire searing through your veins until you can no longer breathe. She knows, and she will do whatever it takes to make sure Margot and Morgan won’t have to.

Once, in a dark room in a bloody house, Alana made a deal with a devil, and the devil made a mistake. He let her go.

But Alana made a mistake then, too.

“I should have let them die when I had the chance,” she tells Margot. “Both of them.”

(Yes, she should have.)

  


_v. sometime after_

_Will doesn’t remember falling asleep. He never seems to anymore. One moment he’s staring at the ceiling through the darkness, the next he’s opening his eyes without ever having closed them. For once, he isn’t sorry for the loss of time. Sleep takes a different meaning when every day could be your last, and Will would rather not spend his final hours unconscious._

_The other side of the bed is empty, the covers perfectly smooth. You’d never guess anyone had been sleeping there the night before. Will reaches out across the cold sheets and can’t tell if he’s relieved or disappointed. After a second, he decides on disappointment._

_They’ve only just arrived in the new place, and Will doesn’t have the lay of the land yet—to be perfectly honest, he isn’t entirely sure where they are. Every time they go somewhere new, it takes Will days to adjust, his mind struggling to take everything in after a lifetime of living in the same country._

_Some things, however, stay the same wherever they go. One of them is what happens when he goes downstairs._

_When Will goes downstairs, there will be breakfast waiting for him on the table. When Will goes downstairs, he will be greeted by a monstrous servant (Chiyoh, who pulled him out of the water, all those months ago) and the monster himself (Hannibal, whom he pulled into it). When Will goes downstairs, everything will click into place, and whatever unfamiliar place they’re staying at becomes the place he’s supposed to be._

_This morning, Will doesn’t want to go downstairs._

_Oh, so it’s today, he thinks._

_Will is not at all surprised by the sudden compulsion. If anything’s shocking, it’s how long it’s taken for this to kick in. How long has he been waiting for his brain to finally catch up to—well, whatever he’s been depending on lately. His heart? That sounds stupid even in his own head. Stupid, he thinks, but probably true._

_So why today? Will ponders the question for only a few seconds before it comes back to him. The dream._

_Will may not remember falling asleep, or being asleep, but he does remember his dreams. Not enough that he could put them into words, just bits and pieces. He focuses, and last night’s dream filters back to him in fragments, like sunlight streaming through closed blinds. Fire. Burning. Hell? Will’s never been one for religion, but the flickering inferno swims before his eyes when he closes them._

_Will is familiar with fire. There was a time when his brain was consumed by it, when he half-expected to burst into flames every time he entered a crime scene. But that time is long past, and the water below the cliff doused any sparks that may have remained. So why is he burning again?_

_Fire. Burning. Hell._

_The cliff. The waves. The shore._

_The fall._

_Will still doesn’t know if he made a mistake. He had already died once, a knife pulled through his guts, his daughter bleeding out on the kitchen floor. It took so long to live again after that. He moved on. He made his choice._ I don’t have your appetite.

_Why did he have to die a second time? Why did he have to take them both over the cliff? Couldn’t he have gone on living without him?_

_He couldn’t have gone on living without him._

_Do I? I do. Was he? He was. Somewhere along the line questions become answers._ You and I have begun to blur.

_Will has no one to lie to anymore except himself. He knows he didn’t make a mistake. He asked a question of fate, and fate gave him an answer. This is the choice he should have made, the path he should have followed, and now he has the chance to take it. All along, he was confused, he couldn’t see: there is a difference between being alive and living._

_The fall, the flames. None of it really matters. Downstairs matters. Where else would he go? Where else has he always been? In the end, he can question and question it, but he will always be drawn there._

_And if he burns, Will thinks, he burns._

  


_vi. always_

When Will goes downstairs, he finds a monster in the kitchen. “Good morning,” he says, and the monster turns and smiles at him.

“Good morning, _lyubov moya.”_

Will shakes his head. “You know, most people go for simpler pet names.”

“We are not most people.”

“No, but I can’t understand what you’re calling me half the time. What language was that?”

“Russian.”

“You speak Russian?” says Will, disbelieving.

“I dabble.”

Will shakes his head again and takes a seat at the small table. Everything in the chalet is small, including the chalet itself—Will would have called it a cabin except for the fact that it’s simply too _fancy_ to be anything but a chalet. The only residence for miles around, unoccupied for years at a time, and leave it to Hannibal to make sure it’s the nicest damn place in the country.

“What country are we in, by the way?” Will inquires as Hannibal sets an omelet before him.

“We are in the Eastern Carpathian Mountains, located in Ukraine. Russian is a commonly spoken language here. If you would prefer, I could address you with Ukrainian terms of endearment instead.”

“I’m all good,” says Will, and begins to eat. “Where’s Chiyoh?”

“Chiyoh has decided that this is where she will take her leave,” says Hannibal, and Will glances up in surprise. “I am afraid you most likely missed that conversation last night. You were very tired from the drive.”

Will frowns. “Yeah, I don’t remember that at all.” He pushes back into his memory, but all that surfaces from the night before is winding roads up the mountain, a brief impression of unpacking, and dragging himself into bed. Unexpectedly, the inferno from last night’s dream intrudes upon his thoughts, flames dancing mesmerizingly before his eyes.

“Will?”

Hannibal is studying him with a concerned expression. Will shakes himself out of it. “Sorry,” he mutters, and goes back to shoveling pieces of omelet into his mouth.

“What were you thinking of?”

“Hell,” says Will. “This is really good.”

“Hell?”

“Let’s not talk about it,” says Will quickly. “Is there oregano in this? Or is it that other herb I confuse it with? Starts with an M?”

Hannibal doesn’t respond. Will looks up and sees that he is wearing a pained, almost hurt expression. He nearly chokes on his omelet in his haste to swallow. “I didn’t mean—we can talk about it if you want—” He coughs. “What did I say?”

Hannibal takes a moment. Then he asks, “Is this...hell for you, Will?” in an odd, constrained voice.

 _“No,”_ says Will so emphatically that Hannibal looks surprised. “It’s just a stupid dream I had last night.”

“I see,” says Hannibal. “What sort of dream?”

“I don’t know. Fire and brimstone and all that. Nothing actually _happened.”_ Will shrugs. “It’s not like it’s tormenting me or anything, I was just thinking about it. I’m well used to fire by now. You should know.”

Hannibal tilts his head to the side. “Why would you think that?”

“Do I really need to remind you of the encephalitis—”

“No, no. Why should you be used to fire?”

Will blinks up at him. “Because my brain was full of it for months? Because my life was full of it for longer? Because if I hadn’t pulled us off that cliff—if I had tried to go on without you—I would have ended up like a burnt-up match. Lifeless.” He makes a face. “And now I guess I get to be on everlasting fire or something stupid like that.”

Hannibal has an absorbed expression on his face. “Is that truly what you believe?” he asks, and Will pauses, because whenever Hannibal asks a question like that you can be sure he’s got a reason.

“I think so,” he says. “What else is there for me but fire?”

“Well, there is ice,” says Hannibal, and Will actually laughs, but Hannibal seems to be as serious as ever. “Tell me, Will, did it hurt?”

“Did what hurt?” says Will, unsure whether or not to expect a pick-up line.

“This,” says Hannibal, waving around the room. “The path to this. It hurt others. It hurt me. But did it hurt _you?”_

Will takes a second, but the answer is already sitting on his tongue, instinctive. “No,” he says. “It felt right. This is where I’m supposed to be. It only ever hurt when I pulled away.”

“Exactly,” says Hannibal, something like triumph on his face. “Fire hurts. It’s not something you ever get used to. Death by burning is one of the most painful ways to die. But the cold—no.” He leans forward, speaking in a softer voice. “You have burned others, Will, but not yourself, never yourself. All this time, you have been freezing over.”

“Oh,” says Will, and it all comes clear. Whispered warnings in his head and screaming headlines in the news—shivers. Alana, Abigail, and Beverly, and all those different versions of himself—cracks in the ice. It hasn’t been easy, no, it hasn’t been painless, but at the end of the day, sinking into the snow feels like falling asleep. At the end of the day, who wouldn’t pick ice over fire?

Will has died twice, once on a kitchen floor and once in a fall from a cliff. Once because he denied fate, and once because he accepted it. Given the choice, Will knows which he would do over again. And again. And again.

_This is all I ever wanted for you, Will. For both of us._

_This is my design._

Ice and fire, fire and ice. Truthfully, it doesn’t matter to him which way his world ends. It only matters how he got there. It only matters who he’s next to when everything cuts to black.

“I love you,” says Will. “I always will. I should have said that sooner.”

(Yes.)

(Oh yes, he should have.)


End file.
